


a postmodern manifesto of joylessness

by sci_fis



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Gen, Hell-related trauma (nothing too graphic), Supernatural Summergen Fic Exchange
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-14
Updated: 2019-09-14
Packaged: 2020-10-18 12:37:17
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,045
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20639291
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sci_fis/pseuds/sci_fis
Summary: Why does the Impala smell like bird?





	a postmodern manifesto of joylessness

**Author's Note:**

  * For [nwspaprtaxis](https://archiveofourown.org/users/nwspaprtaxis/gifts).

  
It smells like bird.

‘Dean,’ Sam says. ‘I don’t remember how I got here.’

Why does the Impala smell like bird?

Patiently, Dean explains. Sam has traveled, literally, to Hell and back. Just as Dean himself had done, all that time ago. ‘You made it,’ he says, proud like a parent, and his tone reassures Sam. (His voice is low and soothing, the way it used to be when Sam was little and woke up with nightmares, unsure if he was still asleep, not realizing—not yet—that monsters actually belonged in the waking world, that the world of dreams was only a weak imitation.) This is Dean, the real Dean: not the fake Deans that Hell had come up with just to torment Sam.

They’re driving toward the opposite coast of the country, not aiming for the ocean specifically, but just driving. Privately, Sam hopes that when they reach the shore, after they get sun and sand everywhere, that they’ll just turn right around and keep driving again.

_Painted stations whistle by,_ he thinks, remembering a line from a poem about looking out of the window of a train. Being inside the car makes everything outside it seem unreal. Everything outside will stay outside, will never have power over him while he’s cocooned in the car with Dean, safe.

He misses the normalcy of hunts, the simplicity of salting and burning. They’re not hunting at the moment, just driving with no real purpose. Hell’s fucked everything up.

‘Wasn’t supposed to be like this,’ he murmurs, head half-turned away from Dean, his forehead against the rolled-up glass of his window. Through the afternoon sun, the asphalt of the road shimmers with heat, as though it’s going to melt in the wake of the Impala’s powerful tires.

Dean’s hands are large and firm on the steering wheel. He doesn’t look at Sam. ‘Like what?’ he asks, absent.

Sam looks at his brother’s hands, so different from his own. Under the bandages that Dean has wrapped carefully around them, Sam’s fingers are torn and bruised, broken from clawing his way out of Hell. His body, used to pain, feels the absence of it in a keen, acute longing. Pain has lived in him for so long, colored his insides with familiar aches, made his skin accustomed to being in shreds. It’s odd now to look down at his wrists and only imagine the barbed wires there instead of feeling delicate metal spiking into his flesh. _Hurt me_, he thinks, but there’s no one to say it to.

—

Every diner looks the same. It even seems as though the cracked vinyl seat has the same stains on it as the last one they stopped at, but no, that can’t be true. That was two states ago.

Dean is smiling at something on his phone. Loneliness bubbles up in Sam, like he’s Bruce Willis’s character in _The Sixth Sense_, lost and wondering why no one seems to acknowledge his dead presence. He looks out of the dirty glass window onto the parking lot outside, where the car gleams blackly in the sun. He can’t remember the last time it was night. He can’t remember the last time he noticed the sun move across the sky.

Back on the road, he can swear he’s seen one of those milestones before: it’s strikingly chipped, resembling an inverted triangle.

‘Are we going in circles?’ he asks.

If Dean answers, Sam doesn’t remember it later. He lies on his back, staring up at a motel room ceiling with water stains from too much rain having seeped into it for too many years.

In the bed next to his, someone is breathing: soft, quiet, even breaths, someone deeply asleep. Sam envies them. (He doesn’t know where he is. He should. Someone should. Someone should know. Someone should have noticed by now that he’s missing. Someone should be looking for him.)

—

It’s the fourth of July. Sam knows because he can see stars and stripes everywhere he looks, jingoism painting the streets and sky with its propaganda. Sam’s always preferred his own private reason to celebrate the day, and it has nothing to do with nationhood and everything to do with the time Dean openly defied Dad’s orders to give Sam something he would enjoy.

‘Hey,’ he says, as he always says on the anniversary of that day. ‘Remember the time we almost burned down that field?’

Dean says something and Sam strains to catch his words, but the wind snatches them away through the open window. Dean could have said _Shut up and let me drive_ or _Best day ever, Sammy._ Sam won’t try to find out because sometimes it’s better not to know.  


—

He dreams he’s back in the panic room, locked up and strapped down, withdrawal symptoms lancing through his body like electric shocks. Dean has left him alone. Sam doesn’t blame him.

He remembers the taste of demon blood. The way it made him feel: strong, powerful, the way he’s never felt otherwise. Like he could take on the world. Like he could keep himself safe. Like he could keep Dean safe. Try to pay Dean back for all the times he’s had to look after Sam, for all the times he’s been a burden on Dean.

‘You’re not a burden,’ someone says. ‘You hear me? It has never been like that. I need you to listen to me. I’m begging you.’

The voice is unrecognizable, lost behind the white noise in Sam’s head.

—

Not bird, he thinks. Not bird.

Feathers.

There are feathers around him, wings forced around him like chains, forcing him to stay in place. There’s light all around, spooling into his eyes, blinding him. Is it Lucifer? Michael?

He doesn’t know. He can’t breathe. Blackness takes him swiftly.

—

When his eyes open again, he doesn’t know if he’s waking up out of a dream, or into one. His cheek is pressed against the glass of the passenger-side window.

‘Reality is so overrated, man,’ Dean says. The non sequitur hangs in the air between them as he floors the accelerator on the empty road, the sky huge and sparkling through the windshield.

—

The Impala smells like bird.

‘Dean,’ Sam says. ‘How did I get here?’

Patient, Dean explains.


End file.
